Why do people smoke? What possible benefit is there? There is no benefit. It costs a lot of money, it’s stinky and it causes cancer. But people continue to smoke. Why?

Because they can. Because people don’t want to care about negativity. This is why the advertising will never work. We’ve all seen the horrific adverts all over the place that use scare tactics to try and stop people smoking. There’s the increased taxes, there are even the bans to try and stop people of smoking. In the majority of cases, none of it works. When I see the adverts on the TV, I think yeh, I shouldn’t smoke, but it doesn’t stop me smoking.

People don’t want to know about the negative side of things. People don’t care. Actually, it’s not that they don’t care, but they’re not bothered enough to do something about it. Subconsciously, they do react to certain things. For instance, when the government force the price of cigarettes up, they simply continue to smoke by spending less on other things. They substitute out of certain things so they can smoke. Elasticity. Interesting.

People are weak. If a change in lifestyle requires some sort of effort to change then it won’t happen. If you can simply ignore a problem then people will do that before making an effort to make a change.

Discuss.

A philosophy professor walks in to give his class their final. Placing his chair on his desk the professor instructs the class, “Using every applicable thing you’ve learned in this course, prove to me that this chair DOES NOT EXIST.”

So, pencils are writing and erasers are erasing, students are preparing to embark on novels proving that this chair doesn’t exist, except for one student. He spends thirty seconds writing his answer, then turns his final in to the astonishment of his peers.

Time goes by, and the day comes when all the students get their final grades … and to the amazment of the class, the student who wrote for thirty seconds gets the highest grade in the class.

His answer to the question: “What chair?”